Another government shutdown victim: Borrowers in need of SBA loans

“Lenders said they continue to process and submit loans to the SBA, but borrowers will have to wait for approvals,” The Wall Street Journal reports. “Other borrowers are facing shutdown-related paperwork snafus that are slowing loan fundings.”

Even if the government gets back to work this week, the SBA “will face a backlog that could delay some loan approvals by six weeks or longer, compared with a normal wait time of about two weeks,” the newspaper reports. The biggest waits “are likely to be for loans that have to go through the standard approval process, either because they weren't made by a 'preferred lender' that can unilaterally underwrite loans or require SBA approval to waive a specific loan requirement.”

Count Don Kelly, owner of Midwest Curtainwalls in Cleveland, among the smart ones who squeezed in an SBA loan on the Friday before the Oct. 1 shutdown. The Journal says Mr. Kelly received SBA approval for a $1 million line of credit for his company, which employs 50 people and makes the exterior walls for high-rise buildings.

"We got in, in the nick of time," says Mr. Kelly, who recently secured two large contracts. He tells The Journal that he plans to use the SBA credit line to cover the gap between when he pays vendors and consulting engineers and when he receives payment from clients.

But finding alternative sources of financing could be tricky for borrowers who missed the cutoff, according to the newspaper.

"If we have someone we've qualified for an SBA loan product, generally speaking, that is going to be the best solutions for them," Maria Coyne, an executive vice president at KeyCorp, Mr. Kelly's lender, tells The Journal. While the bank will help customers look for alternatives, "it's going to be hard for them to qualify conventionally," she says.

By the numbers

So far, big data is not meeting its promise for the medical field, according to this story from ZDNet.com, which includes comments from a Cleveland Clinic surgeon.

A panel of IBM clients at the company's research colloquium on cognitive computing last week was asked to consider whether big data can improve human decision-making.

In response to a question from MIT's Irving Wladawsky-Berger, the Clinic surgeon, Dr. Douglas Johnston, said, “In health care in general, we've been applying data science poorly. We have a medical literature that is contradictory, and we are relying on 100-year-old transcription technology for our records. We still have to dig through those records to get the data. I see the results are failing because it's garbage in and garbage out.”

And that “is the challenge for all of you,” Dr. Johnston said, addressing the audience of computer scientists, according to ZDNet.com's account of the event. “How do we create a system that makes that body of data robust enough that we can work from it?”

But so far, Dr. Johnston said, “The inefficiencies are so rampant in what we do. Cleveland Clinic is the biggest heart care center in the country, but the systems aren't there to support it. It requires a total realignment in how we acquire the data and a change in what the data looks like. We have to evolve as physicians and you have to help us with a system that makes that better."

Dr. Wladawsky-Berger predicted that in “five to 10 years, we'll be able to generate huge amounts of real-time data” about patients.

If that's the case, “I think that will be a huge advance,” Dr. Johnston replied. “We need to know how sick someone is when they come in the door, how well do we do, and how well do they do when they leave. I think we've done an okay job with the second two but not the first. We need a way to look at those outcomes that is not dictated by a doctor into a dictation device.”

The winner by a node

The next time you look at U.S. Census Bureau data about “downtown” employment and population in U.S. cities, keep this story in mind.

TheAtlanticCities.com notes that a Census Bureau report on population trends in American downtowns generated “some grousing about over- and under-counts of local populations,” based on measuring “downtown,” for lack of a better universal definition, as everything within a two-mile radius of the local city hall.

That works in some cities, but it's inadequate in others.

So the International Downtown Association has issued a new report that tries to offer a new way of counting jobs downtown, “measuring where the people who hold them live, and enabling comparisons across cities,” TheAtlanticCities.com says.

Authors Paul R. Levy and Lauren M. Gilchrist created heat maps of job density and then outlined the irregularly shaped districts around them. The data “also includes information on the home and work locations of employees, making it possible to determine which downtowns actually have people in them at night,” according to the story.

The heat maps make clear that many cities, including Cleveland, “don't actually have a single downtown employment center.”

Cleveland, for instance, has a traditional downtown but a separate, significant node around the "anchor institutions" near the Cleveland Clinic.